The DK Foundation

Inheritance

The human being in incarnation is a blend of new and old. The new is the allocation of life, the incarnation itself with the tasks and opportunities created by supplier of that life, the soul. The soul is reflected or, better, represented in the highest levels of the personality. The old is the lower substance of  the three bodies of our personalities: thought forms, emotions and physical properties and that we are recycling on behalf of the human family that generated them. Quite properly we call them our own, and for the purposes of this lifetime they are; they are our share from the collective stock pot and in our personalities they meet with the new in order to be raised up and absorbed. i.e., redeemed.

In the twentieth century, the West began to take up eastern ideas of reincarnation with enthusiasm and added its own touch of drama which is a characteristic of the individuating process. But we are in the Twenty-first century now and are perhaps sufficiently replete with self-dramatizing reincarnation fantasies to be able to focus on what is important.

And what is important is the ideas that the old and the new meet in the personality and that our lower bodies are repositories of memories. For there to be progress the new must absorb the old.

In order to know what is progressive in the context of our own lives we have to be able to recognize our new identity and identify memory, because the memories will try and restore themselves. When this happens there is not redemption there is only recurrence. Memories are quite capable of taking over a lifetime and crowding out those qualities that pertain to the rightful identity. To a greater or lesser extent, this will happen in the life of  a person with no concept of progress and who is guided by a sense of familiarity. It is for this reason that spiritual development is to be understood as a responsibility because through it we enhance our ability to redeem the past on behalf of the human family and on behalf of our planet.

In astrological terms it is the difference between having the Sun as the central organizer of the chart or having the Moon take over that function. The Sun, Uranus, Neptune and the ruler of the Ascendant are the representatives in the personality of the Soul. Saturn will serve either luminary , the Sun or the Moon, either the present or the past, although its natural ally is the Moon. It has to be made to serve the Sun. Planets that are in positive aspect to either luminary or are disposited by it will be disposed to help it.

The memories housed by our personalities are of two kinds: mental impressions and emotional impressions. The mental impressions form the deepest strata of memory and they are represented in astrology by Saturn. The emotional impressions are represented by the Moon. Jointly they comprise our inheritance and they are responsible for the assumptions that we have about ourself (the Moon) and about life (Saturn).

To understand our inheritance and to assess how it stands to help or hinder us in the realization of our true identity which is a transformative process is central to the Foundations’ approach to horoscopy. It is important for anyone seriously engaging with spiritual development to understand that the making progressive decisions (i.e., decisions that will move the life on in the right direction) is going to involve a lot of discomfort because they issue a  challenge to our assumptions and what familiarity makes comfortable. This  is why the feel-good factor is such an unreliable gauge of a progressive decision and why approaches to spirituality based upon it will simply have us turning round and round within old patterns like a fish in a tank because we will reject anything that we do not like or that conflicts with out assumptions about the way thing should be.

Gurdjieff said that a man cannot jump over his own knees (the knees in astrology are governed by Saturn) and, for this reason, he said that a man must have a teacher if he wished to escape the trap of his own personality.

But, fortunately, our personalities are more than our inheritance; they also contain that which is new . If we can recognize what that is and what it requires to make it grow in strength, feeding it on a daily basis in the intelligent living of our everyday lives, then our knees may be made to bend before the Sun and the soul, and the soul aligned personality is not a prisoner of past.

Gurdjieff was teaching and writing a hundred years ago and was greatly influenced by Gnosticism, a very old but very sound system of transformation. That we have this opportunity that he could not see is because of the lives that have passed on since then and whose struggles with the concept of individuality for self-definition and self-mastery we are benefiting from now.